All-Star put the bite back in toothless Tigers

9:13 AM,
Jul. 31, 2008

Ivan Rodriguez helped lead the Tigers to the World Series in 2006.

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He was our baseball bridge from the horrible to the possible, the guy who lays his coat over a dirty puddle of water and allows you to safely walk across. Pudge Rodriguez may not have lived up to his Hall of Fame reputation every single at-bat as a Tiger, but he was the first superstar willing to come to a franchise that was threatening to fall off the major league map.

When no one else wanted to be here, Rodriguez held up a Tigers jersey on a cold February day in 2004 and smiled that gleaming smile and said he was happy to be in the Motor City and added, "We're gonna see this Detroit Tiger team in the playoffs ...

Suh who?
That should be the attitude now. The Detroit Lions' best defensive player — and sometimes their biggest headache — will take his talents to South Beach, and you can cry about it or you can move on.
I'd choose the latter. Like LeBron James, Ndamukong Suh will bolt from a Midwest team that drafted him, a team he never led to a championship, for greener pastures in the state of Florida. But James' departure was to join a trifecta of players engineered to win a championship.
Suh's is not.
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